To reach the stars and beyond, to travel into infinite space alone in the cosmos…

MKM’s Ad Astra Per Aspera is a wonderful mixture of Cosmonaut rock and German terrorist blues. It creates beauty but also, like a black hole, swallows planets whole.

“Terry” is a noise-laden cosmic freakout over a kind of motorik beat that makes it hang together but somehow transcends it into an air of melancholy within its groove. “Retorn Al Planeta Imaginari” is all shimmering atmospheres akin at times to Klaus Schulze‘s early ’70s output mixed with No PussyfootingFripp & Eno ambiences, emitting snake-like guitar drone sounds over light as air synths in a beautiful way. At points it also reminded me of Heldon and Emeralds’

So we’re back again for round two — the second night in a row at London‘s tiny but perfectly-formed Corsica Studios, this time to see space-rock reprobates White Hills and One Unique Signal. And there will be volume. Oh yes, there will be volume. Lots and lots of lovely, lovely volume (say this in the voice of Neil Kinnock‘s Spitting Image puppet for best results).

The first providers of this volume are One Unique Signal, of whom my first thought is that they are terrifyingly young. But this is swept into

Despite its location, deep in the heart of Elephant and Castle, I really, really like Corsica Studios. It’s essentially a tiny concrete box with a wicked sound system, the combination of which tends to funnel intensity and make great music sound just that little bit greater. We’re here to see Bardo Pond, of whom more later

The opener is meaty, elasticised basslines wrapped in kicking drum folds, the guitar caterpillaring plenty of shimmering scenery, traction for a heliumed goblin of vox. A super-tight jigsaw whose balance is temporarily upset by a tempo flick knife into vocals that don’t quite gel until repetition shape-shifts a rescue plan.

I had not been to see anything at Electrowerkz for a very long time; in fact so long, I initially forgot where it was, and so was surprised that the place had changed very little over the years. One thing that has improved though was the sound in the venue, and both acts tonight have a wonderful clear sound that penetrates deep into the audience.

By the time I arrive, Charles Hayward is just taking to the stage. He sits sentinel behind his drum kit and begins to play a series of complex rhythms over a backing tape. Sometimes his drumming is subtle and reminds me of Bill Bruford with its light, almost jazz touch; at other points he clatters

When we look back to the ’90s, back when something that was called post-rock was as vital a part of the musical landscape as Britpop or grunge, we might find ourselves wincing at the apparent uselessness of this subgeneric category, or we might find ourself wincing at the uselessness of all subgeneric categories, or we might find ourselves just not caring either way.

Post-rock was described somewhere apocryphal as what happened if you ditched your vocalist and hired John McEntire to produce your album. And as far as it goes, some of this was true of Trans Am; the McEntire production credit was there, also the lack of songwriterliness and the lack of a singer too; at least initially. Back then, if we were

This is literally bonkers, and monkeys with your expectations in all the right ways, each song swerving from its original starting point in a genre-flinging bewilderment of mood swings (at least four, if not more, times within the confines of each song). Quite a trip, starting with an unassuming country tinge before suddenly going off-road with a rough dose of Eugene Chadbourne-style fisted frets and bouldering percussions, then whipping the carpet clean away moments later in smooth Beach Boys crooning or winkle-picking tremolo lushness.

It’s a great technique that really emphasises the drama, the story underpinning it all with a zaniness akin to Spirit’s Potato Land. A warped tale centring around an errant meerkat (that the pet shop people were usually glad to see go) meticulously and colourfully

On Celestite, the fifth LP from Olympia, Washington’s atavistic warriors Wolves In The Throne Room, the Weaver brothers have done probably the least black metal thing imaginable, and released a record of modular synth soundscapes. And while the keepers of the trve kvlt flame are undoubtedly at home, sharpening their battle axes and planning a jihad, Celestite points out some interesting layers of the modern musical milieu, as well as simply being good music.

Since the very beginning, Wolves In The Throne Room have been accused of being hipster metal — solely responsible for getting a generation of skinny jeans emo vegans into the blasphemous glory of black metal. For the grim hordes this is, of course, unforgivable, but it’s not

“Christ, It’s Lonely” is the title of part three of the most recent release from Gary Mundy (of Ramleh) under the name Kleistwahr, and it’s about as good an indicator of the bleakness to be found mired on This World Is Not My Home as might be required to gauge its intent. Though the dense textures crushed and mushed into the album’s seven pieces (though the CD itself contains only one track) are filled with the sort of discordance and spasms also found in Ramleh’s outpourings of harsh, brutalist psychedelia, this is far more the sound of misanthropic discontent than the battering sludge purveyed by most so-called power electronics, eventually transubstantiated into pure ecstatic trance music with

Wow! This place was superb!! A semi-ruin with a labyrinth of white-clad tunnels eating into the gloom, the natural reverb promoting plenty of pseudo monk fun. The weathered solidity and teasing signs of atrophy, the stonework full of weird apertures that once occupied armoury now harbouring a host of musical oddness.

Ciment starts spasmodic and spare, then proceeds to deploy buzzing, whining breath-fragments and scraping flexions among some moments of stark, simple beauty along the way. Pressed on two sides of vinyl, the LP is fully intended to be listened to with all the accumulated crackles, hiss, pops and incidental warmth the format brings with it, for better or worse.

All sounds originate with Franck Vigroux‘s guitar, and as is often the case when the instrument is treated in an obscure and abnormal fashion, as he frequently does here, there are moments where the vanilla sound is lost so far in the depth of its deconstruction as to sound like nothing so much as a collection of wires, wood and pickups disassembled and

Mounting the stage with a promise of a different set to the previous night’s show at the same venue, Nik Void, Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti settle quickly into place behind a compact selection of effects boxes, mixers and other instruments. As the gig gets underway, the backdrop lit up by the slowly-cycling op-art imagery familiar from their début album projected overhead, the first audible and visual surprise is that Carter is flanked on either side by Void and Tutti, and they’re playing guitars. Certainly, both Factory Floor and CarterTutti have both always used the instrument, but it’s a striking image at odds with the sounds which the trio are generating. The electronic beat is strong, clear and

It’s all about space: between things, around planets, the place of which Sun Ra spoke and the concept which he often evoked. But this is not a jazz album; Dawid Adrjanczyk and Krzysiek Joczyn are more electro-acoustic in their means and perhaps calmer in their demeanour here. The title Tajnie i Głębie – Mysteries and Depths – gives a hint of what the album brings as it rolls in on slow-burning coils of sound that shift and shimmer from low-end rumbles to breathing drones which rise and fall like the chest of a slumbering giant.

If the duo’s chosen name Tundra evokes a similar arctic chill as that summoned by a goodly portion of Thomas Köner‘s oeuvre, then that’s no bad place to

Like the former colonel of the First Earth Battalion, Jim Channon, whom Jon Ronson encountered in the story he recounted in The Men Who Stare At Goats, Radio 9 are apparently encouraging their charges – their listeners – to embark on a mission to achieve the impossible, and walk through the walls; though maybe via the more simple expedient of metaphysically opening up the doors of perception rather than shifting their molecules into different arrangements.

This seems to be the case on “A Futuristic Journey by Car,” where Leon Muraglia sings of “endless streams of light” (the title of Radio 9’s recent album) and “moving without sound” in wasted wastrel style over rhythms lifted straight from the

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"When they’re all playing harmonising black metal riffs, it creates a sound as full and dense as the forests of Washington State that inspire their eco-friendly riff collage" @wittrofficial @aluk_todolo live at Heaven https://t.co/FbWfunzE6w

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